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Marriage Equality Referendum in Ireland

Friday, May 22, 2015

Today Ireland will the only place in the
world where the electorate will have a choice whether to enshrine marriage
equality in its basic law. Voters will choose whether to vote in favour or not
of the following proposed amendment to Article 41 of the Irish Constitution:

“Marriage may be contracted in accordance with
law by two persons without distinction as to their sex.”

Further
details can be found on the Referendum Commission’s website. Details of legal opinion in favour of
marriage equality can be found over at Human Rights in Ireland.

The Amendment has deep links to Canada. As
Angela McConnell notes in her chapter in Defining
Events (Manchester UP: 2015) the campaign for full marriage rights for
same-sex couples by MarriagEquality has its roots in a 2004 case taken by Katherine
Zappone and Ann Louise Gilligan. In 2004
Katherine and Ann Louise were married in Vancouver. They sought to have their
marriage recognise by the Revenue Commissioners in Ireland to avail themselves
of tax benefits accruing to married couples in Ireland. While the action was
unsuccessful, the case (the KAL case, as it became known)
drew attention to the inequality of treatment of same sex couples under Irish
law.

Civil partnerships were made legal in
Ireland in 2011. However as Fergus Ryan explains here
there are significant differences between civil partnerships and marriage under
the Irish
Constitution, which specifically protects marriage
as a the “natural primary and fundamental unit group of Society, and as a moral
institution possessing inalienable and imprescriptible rights and superior to
all positive law.”